5 sep. 2007

Since Rupert Murdoch's $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google...MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like 'God'.Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch sounded the death knell for conventional forms of media in stating that the media elite were losing their monopoly to the rapid and free spread of new communication technologies. Murdoch stressed the need to regain control of these outlets in order to prevent the establishment media empire from crumbling. MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's trojan horse for destroying free speech on the Internet. It is a foundational keystone of the first wave of the state's backlash to the damage that a free and open Internet has done to their organs of propaganda. By firstly making it cool, trendy and culturally elite for millions to flock to establishment controlledInternet backbones like MySpace, Murdoch is preparing the groundwork for the day when it will stop being voluntary and become mandatory to use government and corporate monopoly controlled Internet hubs. The second wave of destroying freedom of speech online will simply attempt to price people out of using the conventional Internet and force people over to internet 2, a state regulated hub where permission will need to be obtained directly from an FCC or government bureau to set up a website.The Nation magazine reported, "Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment.http://pyramid.blog-city.com/internet_censorship_ruppert_murdoch_style.htm

Amateur 'video bloggers' under threat from EU broadcast rules:

THE Government is seeking to prevent an EU directive that could extend broadcasting regulations to the internet, hitting popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube. The European Commission proposal would require websites and mobile phone services that feature video images to conform to standards laid down in Brussels. Ministers fear that the directive would hit not only successful sites such as YouTube but also amateur “video bloggers” who post material on their own sites. Personal websites would have to be licensed as a “television-like service”.http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article603123.ece

One of the fathers of the Internet, David Clark, who served as chief protocol architect for the government's internet development initiative in the 1980s, has been given $200,000 by the National Science Foundation to covertly work on a "whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network," according to Wired Magazine. Clark has vowed to create a "brave new world" in designing the new Internet, characterizing what he wanted for the new network to be "a coherent security architecture." http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2005/06/68004

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act. When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system."Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

Week in review: The taxman cometh back:

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful. State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other Internet-service connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail. http://news.com.com/2100-1083_3-6186567.html

The Pay-As-We-Go Internet will have various metering and billing mechanisms allowing Internet users, or their advertisers or governments, to pay for the resources they consume. This will help coordinate growth of the Internet by using price to communicate between supply and demand, and it will create playing fields for fierce competition on price and new technologies. If the Internet is dead, long live the Internet. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/27/deadnet.idg/

Back door access via CALEA is unfettered access; period. Agencies get Log in,Password,VPN connection.There is no checks and balances to access. Type a few commands and you're in and logging.The laws are have been expanded to ISP's. Land lines and cell phones are subject to monitoring via CALEA and the extension to ISP. & FCC Requires Certain Broadband and VoIP Providers to Accommodate Wiretaps.http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_08.php#003876http://www.fcc.gov/calea/